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An anonymous reader writes "A Mexican terrorist organization sent an explosive device to an ITESM professor due to his research in nanotechnology. ITS or Individuals with Wild Tendencies in english, is a group that claims to be against the 'nanotechnology revolution' in fear of a nanomachine take over that will mean the end of civilization. The group has published on their website that they plan to target individuals in this research field to ensure the survival of mankind. Mexican authorities are investigating the case."

Well I'd put it THIS way, on the one hand they are probably just paranoid and nuts, but on the other hand the history of the human race embracing things before we really understand them and royally fucking our shit up is pretty legendary. After all we've had 'Yeah just burn as much coal as you want...hey why is my skin burning when it rains?", "Asbestos is like a miracle, look how well it protects from fires! Why is Chuck coughing up blood?" and of course "radiation is your friend! Ignore the falling hair a

Uhhh dude? Kinda a difference between simply not knowing any better and not even trying to find out if it is a problem. The CFC you gave is a perfect example of one which could be excused which is why I didn't list it, because at the time we didn't have craft capable of reaching the heights required to take samples, nor did we really have the ability to do long term studies of samples at the purity required to watch the breakdown of CFCs.

On the other hand there is the fact that historically we simply haven'

Even if nanotechnology led to a significant change in our species and others, it's just as natural as anything else that happens in the universe. I wish these Luddites would realize that we don't need to stop where we are.

The issue is that nanotechnology might wipe us out. I don't want that to happen, even if it is "natural".

Exactly, many of us have been working very hard on the LHC to ensure that we get to wipe us all out first. After all we all know from Hollywood documentary movies that all of us scientists are hell-bent on performing insanely dangerous experiments without regard to the fact that they would result in the deaths of our own families and loved ones, not to mention ourselves too.

Actually, that's not unnatural. Lots of species have non-breeding subsets. Most insects, for example, but also a lot of pack mammals. The non-breeders are expendable members of the pack that will defend it from threats and ensure the survival of the rest (allowing their genes to be carried by the offspring of their siblings).

Does that contradict anything that I said? The non-breeding members of a pack are quite often able to breed, but are not permitted to by the pack hierarchy. Mind you, your definition seems to imply that post andropause / menopause individuals can't be celibate, which would surprise a lot of elderly priests...

Replicators already exist. They are robust, they use materials in the environment, they reproduce. They're called "bacteria" and the reason they can't overtake the planet is that it's a very hostile place.
Organisms have evolved for a very long time, and generally they get more efficient at making more of them. Yet here we are. I, for one, am not worried about grey goo.

The main reason our particular species of green goo hasn't overtaken the planet, for example, is that we find lots of other species cute and so we've made a conscious decision not to exterminate them. And even then we lost (and are still losing) quite a few other interesting and useful parts of the biosphere, as we pass through the dangerous "apes with tools" phase on the way in between "apes" and "apes with tools and self-restraint".

What if "bacteria with tools" turn out to be just as big a step above bac

Grey Goo is both an incredible difficult thing to make, and a very pointless thing to make. You'd be much better off with a very efficient nanodevice for performing a specific task paired with a very efficient nanodevice for making those nanodevices (but not itself). Easier and simpler.

I see someone has played Deus Ex:) (IIRC the nanites in that game were not generally self-replicating. Rather, they were created by the Universal Constructor.) That seems like a much more reasonable proposition.

For instance, the problem that never gets mentioned is where the nanites would get the energy. Very few elementary particles would be suitable to become nanites, and reordering them on that scale would take vast amounts of energy. Not to mention memory if they try to act intelligently (hell, on th

I didn't make my point clear enough I guess. When they tested the first nuclear bombs people fear mongered about them igniting the whole atmosphere and how it was going to destroy the world. Same thing is going on with the grey goo scare.

I wouldn't call it "fear mongering", but the claim that the Manhattan project tests could "ignite the atmosphere" via a chain reaction involving nitrogen was raised by none other than Edward Teller. Another scientists (can't recall who) calculated that this was highly unlikely and Teller subsequently retracted his claim.

As for grey goo, it happened ~3.8 billion years ago, we call it the biosphere. Nothing short of vaporising the top few kilometers of the Earth's crust will totally destroy it, and even t

If a trivial sequence of proteins allowed for the kind of replication you're talking about, the world would already have ended. There's been living things fucking around with differing types of biochemistry for the past few billion years; if the self-replicating apocalypse could be achieved trivially, it would have. Some would say that's exactly what did happen.

What you and all the other "grey goo" crowd are overlooking is that it isn't enough to build a machine capable of self-replication. Living things do that already. The "grey goo" scenario already happened around three billion years ago when photosynthesis first arose and organisms began harvesting solar energy. You, the person reading this right now, are a form of naturally occurring self-replicating carbon based machinery. And you've had a few billenia of evolution to optimize the "self-replicating" part.

We could build self-replicating nanotechnology tomorrow, deliberately release it into the environment and it would do... nothing. If it were carbon based, it'd probably become something's dinner.

No, to end the world in a goopocalypse, we'd need to build self-replicating machines that are vastly more rapid and efficient than living organisms. Our goo would have to be better at being grey goo than the existing green goo. The competition has a three and a half billion year head start and are very good at making more of themselves.

I'm going to bold this part for anyone skimming this (admittedly long) post: To end the world with nanotechnology requires self-replicating machines (which we don't have) that are better at reproducing themselves than existing organisms . I'm not going to say it's impossible, but I am going to say with absolute certainty that it won't happen in the twenty-first century. We'll be lucky to even have self-replicating machines in a hundred years. "Grey goo" today is about as likely as a renaissance inventor building a thermonuclear weapon.

biology doesn't try every possible solution, it often sticks with a poor choice because it's just good enough. we also don't know if a bad solution was generated and wiped out all life a few times in the early earth.

You misunderstand; if a "bad solution" as you call it, did arise, it would become the new normal.

Life exists to procreate. A life form that manages to cover the entire planet in it's own self-replicating mass is an evolutionary success. It won't die out; if its replication created an unfavourable environment for its own survival, it may die back, but it will persist.

I'm not talking hypotheticals here either. What I've just described is exactly what happened around three billion years ago.

The basic unit of life isn't the organism, it's the gene. Genes proliferate if they confer reproductive success to the organism they're attached to. They, in a very real and literal way, exist to make more of themselves, because several billion years of evolution has selected in favour of reproductively successful genes.

Genes do not go extinct when the organism they are attached to dies; rather genes go extinct when there are no copies left in any org

The notion of self-interested genes is a bit of a stretch. First, you probably mean allele (a specific state of a gene, such as "defective haemoglobin alpha subunit that causes sickle-cell anaemia" versus "non-defective haemoglobin alpha subunit"), and second, describing alleles (or even whole genes) as competing for success, even ignoring the whole we're-really-just-goo-kicking-around-for-no-reason conversation, is ascribing too much independence to individual genes. It would be better to say that an organ

IMHO Life is the expression of time and interactions.Stable things prevail over unstable things.Stable things which grow prevail over stable things that don't grow.Stable things which grow when split... which grow under broader conditions... which die (making space for new generation)... which use the sun's energy... which move... which are self conscious... which communicate... etc...do prevail.

Biology "tries" every possible solution in the vicinity of the current ones. That's because biology is not a sentient being inventing stuff, but a natural process driven by random mutations and genetic recombination.

And BTW, biology started by the "invention" of self-replicating nanostructures. Because that's what micro-organisms are.

No, to end the world in a goopocalypse, we'd need to build self-replicating machines that are vastly more rapid and efficient than living organisms. Our goo would have to be better at being grey goo than the existing green goo. The competition has a three and a half billion year head start and are very good at making more of themselves.

Green goo, as you call it, has specialized into various niches.Not all of it is green and not all of it is goo, but it more or less tends to stay in its narrow ecological space.

We don't have to make a grey goo that is faster and more efficient than living organisms,it just has to be less discriminating in where it lives and what it considers food.

Generalists in nature have a harder time of things than specialists. Else no organism would become specialized in the first place.

There's a good reason all that green goo is specialized; because if you took an non-specialized plant and dropped it in the soil of a specialist, it's going to get choked out by the native. There are successful invasive plant species, but even then what you've often got is an invasive specialist out competing the native specialists for the kind of environment they both thrive in.

So your non-discriminating grey goo has all the drawbacks of the non-discriminating green goo. Only it has the much larger handicap of not actually existing yet.

We don't have to make a grey goo that is faster and more efficient than living organisms,
it just has to be less discriminating in where it lives and what it considers food.

You say that like there's a single spot on the planet containing anything even slightly approximating food that isn't already full of living organisms. Put your grey-goo nanomachines anywhere you like; they'll still be out-competed and eliminated by the bacteria already living there.

A small correction. Nothing living on Earth would be able to metabolize its aminoacids. Atacking it is a way easier feat, and lots of organisms (maybe most of them) are able to digest (but not assimilate) right chirality aminoacids.

Fear that maniacs will get a hold of destructive power will keep this power in the hands of self appointed cabals which will act in the name of national security. Many of those actors will be in good faith, too. It won't stop evil people in the long run.

We are in a society who already tested nuclear device on their own people, which experiments on animals and does medical research without making every result publicly available (which means either unneeded additional research and cruelty or death as conseque

Plants and micro-organisms are a type of "goo". What distinguishes "gray goo" is that it is new, was created in a short period of time, and therefore has no natural predators and is not in equilibrium with the environment. It is certainly thermodynamically possible, as micro-organisms demonstrate.

First, you're abusing tenses. Second, it is thermodynamically possible for micro-organisms to thrive under limited sets of conditions per organism; in order to qualify for the name, gray goo has to take apart essentially everything, and preferably use it, too. That's a dramatically more difficult job than any life on this planet is capable of. That doesn't rule it out, but the energy requirements are enormous and once any such mass really gets going, solar power is incapable of producing enough energy to ke

Interesting. But I think the danger is not so much that the "goo" would take apart everything. The danger is that it would take us apart, perhaps unintentionally (to the extent that nano-bots could have intention). E.g., perhaps the bots would seek out calcium and eat our bones, having been designed to leach something else. It is all wild speculation because we are not close to anything that would be dangerous, but the pace of advancement is ominous.

Never much bought into the whole grey-goo thing. Isn't that the plan of every bacteria and mold out there? It seems that if it were within our abilities, it probably would have already occurred through bacterial evolution.

And what stops "grey goo" from acquiring its own bacterial/fungal parasite?

Biological organisms evolved slowly, and predators evolved along-side them. "Gray goo", having been introduced very suddenly and being very different from the rest of the biosphere, would not be in equilibrium with the environment and could easily get out of control.

Except that it wouldn't. It would be a self replicating organism which, like everything else required energy and materials to reproduce. Converting arbitrary materials into other materials is extraordinarily energy intensive and so would put it at a significant disadvantage reproductively speaking compared to other current organisms, or it would have to use the materials it was made of to produce more of itself like everything else. Given that there's pretty much nothing on earth which is readily available

But the public needs to become aware of the very real danger that nanotechnology, biotechnology, and AI pose.

Bullshit. This is real life, not a movie. The tech will likely never be as capable or sophisticated as the magic masquerading as technology in Sci-Fi.

It is indeed very, very likely that humanity will not survive this century.

If nanotech is your biggest fear then you are so far out of reality that it's laughable. An eventual nuclear war between any of India/Pakistan, Iran/Israel, North Korea/Somebody is far more likely to be the biggest threat this century, and unlike nanotech, actually behaves the way it appears on video.

Nuclear war in some part of the world my occur, but that has nothing to do with the issue of nanotechnology. The fact is, nanotechnology is a tremendous risk. The inability to see this is only a lack of imagination.

And the belief that it is a very real threat is an incredibly overactive imagination. People are well aware of the POSSIBLE risks, even as small as they are. Stop reading a bunch of science fiction and start looking at science facts. You may as well bomb the LHC because it could collapse the universe or create time travel possibilities.

True, entertainment's "mystery force" was nuclear from the '50s-'90s, then it was biotech in the 90s and 00s, and now in the '10s it's starting to shift to nanotech. See: GI Joe movie, Crysis (a nanotech Spider-Man...hey Spider-Man's generally kept up with the mystery force of the times, will the new movie have a nanotech Spider-Man?), all the dumb shit being advertised as "nanotech-enhanced."

After very careful consideration over many years, I have concluded that these doomsday scenarios are not unlikely. In fact, I believe that the "singularity" is a very probably occurrence in this century, and that humanity as we know it will cease to exist. My whole life I have been a proponent of technology, and a "promethean" as Ben Bova put it. I also have several degrees in the sciences and have worked in technology for 30 years. But I now realize that we are a train about to run off the rails.

Grey goo is theoretically possible but highly unlikely. Since you consider the singularity to be a bad thing I take it you're worried about a Terminator-type situation, which again is unlikely. Why do you focus so much on the worst (remotely) possible outcomes of new techologies?

Nanotech is going to do what to us? Grey goo us to death? Nuclear war is much more likely. Piles of warmongers have (or are trying very hard to have) nuclear weapons. We are one mistake on one escalation awar from nuclear war, and you think that someone will invent intelligent self-replicating machines that will devour the planet? Someone needs a lesson in risk analysis

"An eventual nuclear war between any of India/Pakistan, Iran/Israel, North Korea/Somebody is far more likely to be the biggest threat this century,"

Atmospheric testing has proven that level of nuclear warfare won't be much of a problem except for the countries taking the hits. Enough warheads to match or beat that level of nuclear exchange have been detonated with little fallout (pun intended!) aboveground. Many of those shots were in the US.

Actually, I have two master's degrees and an undergrad in physics (from an Ivy League school), and according to the SAT tests I took in high school I am in the 99th percentile.... In fact, the lowest score I ever got on the SAT or GRE in any subject was 720. So I think I have some intellect. Your use of personal attacks shows what you are about. I won't be responding to you anymore.

Is the science as bad as his other books? I picked up a couple in the local charity shop recently. The stories are fun, but the science is just painful. Even someone skim-reading Wikipedia would have a better understanding of the topics he covers than he seems to.

I think that bombing people is horrible. But the public needs to become aware of the very real danger that nanotechnology, biotechnology, and AI pose. It is indeed very, very likely that humanity will not survive this century.

Your statement is both pathetic and sad. It's pathetic in that such profound ignorance actually exists and promotes itself. It's sad in that there are probably many ignorant victims who will actually swallow its fearful and intrinsically defeatist message.

Please elaborate.
Neither your content-free original trolling post nor your numerous content-free irate responses to the critics of said trolling post contain any suggestion of your being other than ignorant on the topic of nanotechnology.

Agreed, GP is overmodded for a post that says nothing. For comparison:

Nano- and Bio-tech are very real dangers, I can swallow that. I might even buy the idea that mankind can create a disaster it cannot itself recover from. However, I'm going to say (largely in ignorance) that it's likely that any disaster we create will be behind our knowledge-curve, not ahead of it--because in general, engineering lags behind science by a fair bit. (See also: Every article on/. about new battery tech, solar cells, et

Interesting point, that our science would be ahead of the engineering. I hope you are right: the stakes are very high.

The point that the technology would have to be designed to wipe us out ignores the unique and scary aspects of future nanotechnology, biotechnology, and AI: the potential to evolve on their own, and to replicate themselves.

With regard to power source, we only need to look at the examples that nature provides: all the bacteria out there. These have a power source: the sun. But what makes bact

A stand-alone computer becomes self-aware. Where is the risk? What is the probability that someone will invent a self replicating and self-fueling nanobot and program it to destroy the planet? And what "biotech" do you object to? GMOs? The FDA weaponizing anthrax for the military for our bio-weapons programs for plausible denyability for the treaties that violates?

you're saying we don't have engineers and scientists that wouldn't cheerfully work on something that could kill a billion people or more? a done deal, I can name two countries that have spent over five trillion (5 x 10^12) dollars each to build and deploy systems for just that. They also spent billions of dollars on alternative systems with a different type of tech with the same goal. I can assure you in this world we have the money, the will, the whackjobs.

Sure we have engineers and scientists who would work on a project to kill billions, and we have governments who would want it.

What we don't have are governments who want to indiscriminantly kill billions of people. Sure, a device intended to kill billions of specific people could accidentally kill everyone, but no one is working towards that explicit goal. In addition we also don't actually have any weapons which are capable of killing billions of people despite trillions of dollars of research. We have a b

What we don't have are governments who want to indiscriminantly kill billions of people
Massive depopulation is one of the topics the wealthy who have our governments in their pockets discuss at their yearly conference. Some of those meetings have been secret. Some of the means have been reported as extreme.

we have paid scientists and engineers to design (at *least* that stage) cobalt and gold jacketed nuclear devices that would kill all people except for those who were in underground bunkers for years. I don't think you fully appreciate the level of twisted evil socialpathic fucks we have in the military-industrial complex.

For some reason any and all technological advances have been met with ludicrous resistance based on a combination of superstition and ignorance. Often the church was the driving force, seeing all changes as a threat to their wealth and power. In other words this is nothing new.

Nanotechnology and biotechnology is no more dangerous than other radical technologies. Nuclear power for instance has many more potential dangers than nanotechnology, and the dangers of biotechnology are well known and un

Saying something challenging or controversial is not trolling. Trolling is saying something designed to provoke anger. My post is not a trolling post. If one cannot have a discussion here about something controversial without being called a "troll", then what is the point of this discussion board?

The observation that people "have always said that" is an attempt to say that, in some abstract sense, nothing has changed, that history will repeat: if there was no threat before, and people have falsely claimed t

As the research is being conducted at ITESM, it should be "Terrorists Target (mon)Terrey Tech Teacher".

But seriously and obviously, if the research is suppressed in Monterrey, a place like, say Chandigarh, would sooner or later pick up the slack.So these provincial, misguided pedobombers would only manage to injure their own country, but fortunately for Mexico that ain't gonna happen.

BTW, pedo is "fart" in Spanish, pedobombers is exactly the epithet they deserve.